Week 7

Here's what I got from the garden today and yesterday: our first 3 zucchini, a handful of cherry tomatoes, a few green onions, and 2 banana peppers (from a potted pepper plant).

Here is a bunch of Grape tomatoes that will be ripening very soon.  

We have heads forming on 6 of the broccoli plants!  

Our first yellow squashes are starting to form. 
These cucumbers are growing almost an inch a day.  
One of the cucumber vines is almost at the top of the bean pole.  In this bed are LOTS of baby zucchini that will be ready to pick in the days to come.  
The tomatoes appear to have recovered from the issue(s) they were having last week and have put out a ton of new baby green tomatoes and fresh growth.  

Other garden views

This isn't a regular update, but just some alternate views of the boxes with some pictures of the herbs, taken last Friday.  

Notice the strawberry is covered with a net to keep the evil squirrels out.  
This is potted basil, chives, mint.
Looking toward the house. 

Looking away from the house.  
And here's the 3 canteloupe vines, starting to climb up some tomato stakes.  They're blooming, too!  

I never got to put up last week's pictures, but I knew I needed to get  these up before this week's!  

This picture is showing one of the tomato plant's leaves.  Over the last 3 weeks, we have had cool and very rainy conditions, so it appears that something has started to make the plants deteriorate.  I called the Clemson Extension office, and they told me that it could be something viral, bacterial, fungal, or even a nutrient deficiency (due to all of the fertilizer being washed away from the heavy rains.)  There's just so many possibilities and we couldn't pin it down to one cause.  One of our neighbors had a similar "blight" on their tomato plants, too.  


You can see how some of the zucchini leaves are beginning to be discolored.  The leaves were very dry, thin, and brittle, even with the inches of rain we'd been having.  
Every tomato plant was affected by the speckled leaves that were in the first photo.  

I put fertilizer on each plant and copper-based fungicide (per Clemson Extension's advice), and they appear to have come back.  The new growth is healthy and speckle free.  Look for more pictures later today with much healthier-looking plants.   

The first harvest

This week we picked these beauties from the Goliath bush.   They are pretty big (compare to the pencil) and just perfect.  There's nothing like fresh tomatoes!  We've been buying tomatoes from the Goose Creek farmer's market and they are a thousand times better than the pinkish, mealy old tomatoes from the grocery store.  And the flavor is so much better.  

The Farmer's Market is Thursdays from 2:30-6:30 at St. James Methodist Church (between the catholic church and the Lowe's on St. James Avenue.  

Week 5 Update

Such a cloudy day!  I went out between showers to get these photos, but they are a little dark due to the heavy cloud cover.  The rest of these tomatoes needed to be caged too!  
I took this picture of the rhubarb.  Those leaves are almost a foot across!  In the picture below, the rhubarb is in the upper left corner of the box.  
The cabbage and the poor broccoli plant that was attacked by the cutworm are in the front.  Look at how the broccoli is taking off.  Each plant had coffee grounds and crushed eggshells applied around the stem this week, hopefully to deter future cutworms.  
The cucumbers are starting to climb!  The zucchini are blooming like crazy, too.  
Even though this is a really overcast picture, if you click on it to make it bigger you might be able to see lots of tiny tomatoes on the plants.  The big plant on the right of the box has offshoots that need a cage of their own.  All are doing well!

Sam the turtle

On April 30, Mom looked out in the backyard and saw something movingn in the yard next door. When she looked closer, she saw that it was a turtle. A and I ran out to the fence because we've never seen an actual turtle that close out in the wild. (Normally they are behind glass or a fence at a zoo.) We were so excited! M came out a few minutes later and we sat there for the longest time just staring at it. After a while, we had to go eat dinner so, reluctantly, we went in and ate. About halfway through dinner, I looked out and the turtle was making a beeline (turtle-line?) for the gate in the neighbor's yard. We finished eating and Mom started clearing the table when she looked out the window and saw that the turtle was almost to one of our boxes! He had visited us just for our snack bar! Grandpa went to the shed and got a bucket. A, M, Grandpa and I took the bucket with the turtle to the creek and set him free. (1st picture) He didn't want to be set free so I found a stick and guess what? If you poke a turtle's tail, he goes! He went so fast once he got to the water. That was such an adventure for us! We all did our good deed for the day!

Week 4 update

Tomato cages were added to the largest plants this week.  I had 4 stakes on the largest one, so it needed caging.  The largest tomato has started turning red, so it will be picked before the evil evil squirrels get to it.  

The evil evil squirrels have been insanely digging holes.  They are uprooting the onions and making the larger plants lean way over where the dirt has been removed from the stems.  Daily I go out and place the dirt back around the stems of the plants and rebury the onions.  Grr.  I put a healthy dose of cayenne pepper on the soil...hopefully this will deter them from digging, but it probably won't.  Only hunting them down one by one will.  

A cutworm got to one of the broccoli plants (front and center in the picture to the right of the cabbage plant.)  I replanted the severed plant a few days ago and although it looks pretty shabby right now, it seems to be putting out new growth.    More coffee grounds are going around the remaining broccoli plants.  

A cucumber vine has had a growth spurt and is climbing the strings leading to the bean pole.  Hope this week's updates are positive!  

Week 3 update

These are the latest photos, taken on Friday, May 1.  The plants were given a dose of fertilizer Friday, too.  (This Friday's pictures will really show a difference that MiracleGro can make!)

Marigolds were added to the bed of tomatoes and peppers (bad bugs don't like them, but they will attract pollinators), and Texas sweet onions were added to the bed of broccoli and cabbage.  

The top picture shows a find of Kirstin's.  She went to the spring plant sale at TTC's greenhouse and picked up these hydroponically grown Micro Tom tomatoes.  They are about as big as they will get and the tomatoes are about as big as a dime.  We'll keep these in the rocks and water since they are happy growing that way.  

We had an unexpected visitor to the yard last week.  Something had been getting after Granny's Pregnant Plant (Kalanchoe).  Then on Thursday we saw a large turtle in the neighbor's yard as we were grilling outside...then while we were eating dinner, it managed to leave their yard, go under their gate, come under our gate, and it was spotted making a beeline for the "salad bar".  The kids and Grandpa got it into a bucket and delivered it safely to the lake across the street, ALL the way down at the far end of the lake.   A picture of the fellow will be posted later when it gets from Kirstin's cell phone to my computer.  

This week's plan: build a narrow (3'x6') bed for asparagus, maybe one for strawberries.  Last week I looked for more fence boards, but was having trouble finding straight and knot hole-free boards.  I have bales of straw ready, and plan on heading to the landfill for more compost later this week.